Node-RED 0.10.6: Nick O’Leary has announced Node-RED 0.10.6 with various changes to the editor, nodes and API. If you don’t know Node-RED, it’s a rather graphically splendid way of wiring the internet of stuff and stuff in general together – I did a few bits with it on here. With this release, there’s also a new command line administration tool for Node-RED so you can control nodes without having to restart the entire process…. and that uses an Admin API which is now stable and documented. There’s also been a switch in versioning to an easier to track odd/even (development/released) scheme. I’ll be getting back into Node-RED soon myself, ideally when it supports Node 0.12 – currently you’ll need a Node 0.10 to hand to run it.

MOAR PI POWAH: The Raspberry Pi 2 has a lot more power than the older version in terms of CPU, but those USB ports are still pretty power anaemic. By default the total power draw can be 600mA, tweakable in software to 1.2A. That tweakability led to this fine Hackaday hack which involves swapping some components on the board to get a full 2.1A to the USB ports, 500mA a port. The reason the USB is so weedy is good; the Pi is designed to be powered by a Micro-USB connector, so available power is that minus the CPU. Not a lot. And now you have a reason to buy a decent PSU for your Raspberry Pi. The official PSU pushes out 2A into the microUSB.

Arduino IDE gets its groove back: After ages spinning its wheels, the Arduino IDE 1.6 came out and surprised many people. Even more surprising is that its getting new features and quickly. In the March 28th release Arduino IDE 1.6.2, the latest features as a Library Manager which can install from Github repos and a board manager which should make adding new boards much easier. These have been two real pain points in the IDE so to see them addressed is great news. The really great news though was that by April 2nd, the team had released Arduino IDE 1.6.3 which addressed various bugs and responded positively to feedback making it even easier to adopt and use.